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Attitudes and perceptions of first year students towards interprofessional education in the Faculty of Community and Health Sciences at the University of the Western Cape

Filies, Gerard C. (2012-12)

Thesis

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The setting for this study was the University of the Western Cape, Faculty of
Community and Health Sciences, first year undergraduate students. All students who
participated in the compulsory interprofessional programme were from the following
disciplines: Occupational Therapy; Physiotherapy; Psychology; Social Work; Natural
Medicine; Dietetics; Human Ecology; Sports Sciences and Nursing.
The objectives of this study were to measure the attitudes and perceptions of first
year students who participated in an undergraduate interprofessional programme.
The attitudes and perceptions were further measured in relation to the specific
lecturers involved, the age of the students, their gender, race, background as well
their specific discipline.
This was primarily a quantitative study incorporating two qualitative questions in
which 657 students were issued with a questionnaire designed to determine their
attitudes and perceptions towards interprofessional education. A sample size of 264
students resulted in 95% confidence intervals with a maximum precision of 5%. The
questionnaire was adapted, with permission, from Cameron; Rennie; DiProspero;
Langlois & Wagner (2009). MS Excel was used to capture the data and STATISTICA
version 9 (StatSoft Inc. (2009) STATISTICA (data analysis software system),
www.statsoft.com.) was used to analyze the data from the questionnaires.
Descriptive statistics was used to describe the main features of the sample of this
study and summary statistics was further used to summarize the findings of this
study in order to communicate the bulk of the information as simple as possible.
Two open-ended questions were included at the end of the questionnaire and this
was used to triangulate the data.
The Kruskal-Wallace test was used to measure the results, whereby a p-value of
<0.05 indicated statistical significance. Of all the factors used to measure the
attitudes and perceptions of students, the following three were significant: Gender;
Race and Discipline. No other factors impact on the attitudes and perceptions of
students towards interprofessional education. Student attitudes and perceptions towards interprofessional education were found to
be very positive. The findings revealed that the most significant factor in the study
was the lack of understanding of various disciplines participating in the programme
and their understanding of the relevance of the teaching approach (interprofessional)
as well as their specific role in the health care team. This clearly illustrated the need
to recommend to the co-ordinating unit of the programme that this be defined more
clearly for the students and specifically the Sports Sciences students.